THE OLD TESTAMENT

THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

The Orthodox Church has always held to the use of the Septuagint text of the Old Testament, and to the wider Canon which includes the Deuterocanonical Books. All Christians everywhere did so until after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.

The Septuagint and the wider Canon was the Old Testament of the early Church and remains the Old Testament of the Orthodox Church today. The Orthodox Canon of Holy Scripture contains seventy-six Books: 49 Books in the Old Testament and 27 Books in the New Testament.

Protopresbyter James Thornton writes, “ the Synod of Jerusalem [1672], not unlike the Council of Trent, bestowed ‘deuterocanonical’ status on these books — which are typically referred to by Orthodox as…(‘anagignoskomena’), ‘things that are read,’ a term that implies their acceptability for ecclesiastical use — by stating explicitly what was already the long-standing unwritten tradition of the Orthodox Church regarding them” (The Ecumenical Synods of the Orthodox Church — A Concise History, p150).

The term deuterocanonical refers to the fact that the Orthodox Church declared these Books that had always been in the Canon of Scripture to be “canonical” a second time, that is in the 17th century at the Council of Jerusalem after more than a century of Protestant attacks upon them. The Church has historically preferred the term “anagignoskomena,” meaning “things that are read” to deuterocanonical, but deuterocanonical is most commonly used in the West today. The terms “apocrypha” or “apocryphal,” meaning “hidden” (unrecognized), are never used of these Books.

The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Holy Scriptures made by Seventy (or seventy-two) Jewish scholars some two centuries before the birth of Christ. For centuries Greek was the lingua franca of the ancient world, even in the Holy Land, so use of the Greek Old Testament was widespread among the Jewish communities.

Western scholars used to criticize the Orthodox Church for its unwavering commitment to the Septuagint, but time has proven the Orthodox Church to be right. The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press) says, “A significant legacy of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is related to their attestation to the reliability of ancient translations. It is no longer possible to argue that differences from the MT [Masoretic Text] preserved in the ancient translations… reflect intentional changes introduced by the translator rather than a different underlying text… Readings from the ancient translations hitherto regarded as questionable have now been shown to preserve authentic Hebrew ones” (pp. 1922-1923).

The Old Testament that the vast majority of Western Christians have in their Bibles is the Masoretic Text, although the Apostles and the early Christians used the Septuagint Version. They could not have used the Masoretic Text because it did not come into being until about a thousand years ago. The Septuagint on the other hand antedated the time of Christ by a couple of hundred years and is some 1200 years older than the Masoretic Text.

The New Testament frequently quotes from the Old Testament, but if these quotes are compared to the Old Testament text itself, it is clear that they often vary considerably from what is found there. The New Testament writers were not misquoting the Old Testament Scriptures or paraphrasing them. The New Testament writers were quoting from the Septuagint, but most modern Bibles contain the Masoretic Text, — a Jewish text from nearly a thousand years after the time of Christ.

The Orthodox Church uses the same Bible that the Apostles and early Christians used. Western Christians no longer do, and that is one of the reasons why their theology has often diverged from that of the Orthodox Church. They may be following their Bible, but they are not using the Bible that the Apostles and early Christians used.

The Protestant Reformers adopted the Masoretic Text because they assumed that the Jews knew best about the Old Testament, but they were unaware that the Masoretic Text was only about 500 years old when the Reformation began and is unfaithful to the original Hebrew. The Septuagint is some 1200 years older than the Masoretic Text.

Unfortunately, Rome later allowed the use of the Masoretic Text as well in an effort to keep up with the Protestants. The Masoretic Text was never used by the Apostles or early Christians, is only about a thousand years old, and was unknown to the Christians of the first millennium.

Is it any wonder that post-Great Schism Western Christians have deviated from the teachings of the Orthodox Church when you realize that they are using a Bible that is different from what was used in the “undivided” Church, was unknown to the early Christians, and that reads very differently in many places?

Fr. Joseph Gleason has written an excellent article on this subject that was published by Fr. John Peck of the Preachers Institute. It is titled, Masoretic Text vs. Original Hebrew. Here is the link:

For further reading on the differences between the Septuagint and Masoretic Texts, the book Which Bible is Better? How to compare versions of the Bible, by Fr. Joseph Gleason, is highly recommended. Fr. Joseph Gleason was an Anglican priest and pastored a parish of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) before entering the Orthodox Church and becoming an Orthodox priest serving a Western Rite parish. You can order the book, Which Bible is Better? here:

Orthodox Christians are serious students of the Holy Scriptures, and have a large and growing number of commentaries — both from the Fathers and from modern Orthodox writers — as well as other Bible Study materials available to them. In addition, we have the Orthodox Study Bible. If you do not already own a copy of the Orthodox Study Bible, you will want to purchase one. You can order it here: